Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has taken to X to officially announce the proposed acquisition of AI startup Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The transaction is slated for completion in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. Huang stated that the two parties will work together to expand the Hugging Face platform's scale and strengthen its infrastructure, enabling developers and institutions worldwide to access artificial intelligence technology more conveniently.
More than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators currently use Hugging Face, which hosts over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Over 200,000 enterprises leverage the platform to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI models. Importantly, Hugging Face will continue operating as an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, with developers free to select the models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference service providers, and computing platforms that best suit their needs.
A critical aspect of the deal highlighted by Huang is that developers working on Hugging Face will not be required to use Nvidia computing power. The platform will maintain its support for open-source and open-weight models from all developers within the ecosystem, as well as continue to enable development and deployment across multi-cloud and multi-accelerator environments. This ensures developers can choose the hardware and infrastructure most appropriate for their specific business requirements.
Nvidia's commitment to open models, data, and tools stems from the belief that these lower the barriers to AI adoption. The company has already contributed hundreds of open-source models and datasets to Hugging Face. With Nvidia's infrastructure, engineering expertise, and global reach, the platform will be able to serve an unprecedented global AI community, enhancing its reliability, security, model evaluation, inference, and deployment capabilities while preserving the open ecosystem on which Hugging Face was built.
Huang expressed that the Hugging Face team will continue its journey with passion and expertise on an even larger stage, with the iconic 🤗 brand remaining intact through the transition.